Carbon Sequestration

A Study on Method Development for Measuring Carbon Balance in the Chemical Sequestration-Phase
2 has been awarded to the Combustion Lab by US DOE and Paras Research Corporation.

Three stages of carbon dioxide management and sequestration have been proposed. These
stages include CO 2 capture from power plant flue gas -using ammonium solutions in
a wet scrubber to react with CO 2 to form ammonium bicarbonate fertilizer (stage 1),
short-term carbon storage through enhanced growth of biomass using the ammonium bicarbonate
fertilizer (stage 2), and long term carbon storage by securely sequestering CO 2 as
carbonates in underground water systems (stage 3). By following the utilization of
ammonium bicarbonate as a fertilizer, a test protocol was developed with an ecosystem
containing soil, groundwater, biomass and atmosphere with temperature, moisture, Ph
and composites control. Sample selection, sampling plans development, laboratory-scale
experimental unit design, analytical method development and test matrix selection
were completed in Phase 1. A greenhouse will be constructed, and a series of experiments
to study carbon balance in a simulated ecosystem will be conducted in Phase II. Three
typical crops, three typical soils and three ground waters will be used in the simulated
ecosystem. Carbon-14 will be used as a tracer in the experiments. A model for carbon
transformation from ammonium bicarbonate to the terrestrial ecosystem will be developed.